First Turning of the Dharma Wheel
The Noble Truths concerning suffering (duḥkha) and the Five Aggregations (skandha)
Vijñāna (Pali viññāṇa, ’Consciousness’) - विज्ञान vi + jñāna = Divided Knowledge.
- Understood as an emergent phenomena dependent upon contact between sense-organ and sense-object. No contact, no consciousness.
- There are six ‘kinds’ of consciousness, dependent upon the aforementioned contact (sparśa), so ‘eye consciousness’, ‘ear consciousness’, etc. up to a sixth consciousness, called manovijñāna.
- As the fifth skandha, the particular state of the six vijñāna is dependent upon the organ or organs’ form (rūpa), sensory reactions (vedanā), perception (saṁjñā) and conditioned behaviors (saṃskāra).
Second Turning of the Dharma Wheel
Dependent Origination (pratītyasamutpāda) and
(therefore) Emptiness of self-nature (śūnyatā nisvabhava)
Vijñāna is the third link in the 12-link chain of causation, dependent solely upon condition(ing)s (saṃskāra) and ignorance (avidyā).
- Consciousness, like all phenomena, ultimately lacks inherent nature (svabhava) and is ‘empty’.
- There is no one thing to be conscious.
- This introduces, what is called, the doctrine of ‘Two Truths’ - the conventional truth about the skandhas and suffering, and the ultimate truth about emptiness and the lack of self-nature.
Third Turning of the Dharma Wheel
The Ultimate Meaning of True Suchness (paramārtha-bhūtatathatā)
Vijñāna is ‘revealed’ to be eight-fold. In addition to the six consciousnesses of the First Turning:
- A ‘seventh consciousness’ that refers to the ‘selfing’, appropriating aspect of consciousness. The exact name for this vijñāna varies depending on the source. It is considered the sixth consciousness in its defiled state (kliṣṭamanovijñāna), and is sometimes called manas-vijñāna (’thinking consciousness’) or ādāna-vijñāna (’appropriating consciousness).
- An ‘eighth consciousness, called the ālaya-vijñāna - the ‘storehouse consciousness’ - which ‘stores’ all the ‘karmic seeds’ of saṃskāric impressions.
- All forms of vijñāna, discriminative awareness (’divided knowledge’), are ‘purified’ by the wisdom that understands the ‘Three-Fold Nature’ of all phenomena: being totally illusory, other-dependent, and completely perfect.